Ironically, VLB was based on the 486's local bus.
Many people may know Intel also contributed to the initial USB standard, but they also created AC97, HD Audio, and AMR/CNR.
Many people may know Intel also contributed to the initial USB standard, but they also created AC97, HD Audio, and AMR/CNR.
> To put that all another way, VESA came up with a slightly faster bus standard for the next generation of graphics cards, one just fast enough to meet the needs of 486 users. Intel came up with an interface designed to reshape the next decade of computing, one that it would even let its competitors use.
It's crazy how useful PCI was. Intel kept being the company that made standards, that created places for cooperation. In an industry where historically it felt like every company wanted to take on the world solo. Its hard to think of a company that has done more to grow the pot in an industry than Intel.
(Intel also created nvme!)
To be fair they did that because there were already several vendor-specific proprietary PCIe-attached-SSD products (notably in Apple's macbooks) and the lack of a standard way of doing this was a major fragmentation risk.
PCI and PCIe were generous gifts from Intel to the rest of the industry and involved giving away a fair amount of hard-won development results (like the pcie serdes electrical parameters). NVMe was more a case of Intel being the referee because we needed somebody to make an arbitrary decision.
Are you confusing the protocol for the mechanical connector and form factor? Prior to using NVMe, Apple was using PCIe SSDs that spoke AHCI, the Intel-supported industry standard for storage controllers used by almost all SATA controllers.
The M.2 card connector and form factor were standardized by PCI-SIG and are unrelated to NVMe.
There were very few consumer PCIe SSDs sold before the adoption of NVMe, and they were almost exclusively sold to OEMs rather than as retail products. A few like the Samsung XP941 and SM951 were available through grey-market retailers for about a year before Samsung launched the 950 PRO as an official retail product, using NVMe (with an Option ROM). (Note: the SM951 existed in both AHCI and NVMe variants, so some of those grey-market retail sales were of drives that were essentially 950 PROs with slightly older flash).
It's not entirely impossible that Gigabyte shipped boards that couldn't boot from AHCI PCIe SSDs. But it would be difficult for that to be a driver issue. I'd expect those boards to also have difficulty booting from an add-in SATA controller card, because the difficulty booting from AHCI SSDs would have to come not from a lack of an AHCI driver but from a misconfiguration preventing that driver from being used with anything other than the SATA controller built-in to the motherboard.
How sure are you that you didn't miss the brief era of AHCI SSDs entirely and are simply remembering early NVMe teething issues?
It had to be AHCI because macOS didn't support NVMe in this era, and the motherboard was also chosen for Hackintosh compatibility, but I only ever used it as a data drive because of the boot issues. That was probably the best option for its use as a fast compile machine anyway, but it did become a PITA when I wanted to sell the machine.
I'm afraid I am not familiar with this technology - as I said I am not an expert - so perhaps driver is the wrong word. Perhaps I did end up reading advice relating to the NVMe variant, information was very hard to come by. All a very small historical footnote now anyway!
I think we still would have been stuck with a bunch of vendors making exotic expensive boutique flash storage systems for a while had Intel not come by & made a fairly sizable overhaul of the existing protocols.
They got better as time went on but it really took a number of years before people could get reasonably high-performance, reliable PCI implementations. For x86, aside from AMD's Irongate (750/760) chipsets (K7-era) and nVidia (nForce), pretty much only Intel had PCI working reasonably. ALI, VIA and SiS PCI implementations always had weird issues and quirks.
PCI-IDE adapters are another good example -- VIA's PCI IDE had all sorts of issues, if you wanted high performance PCI IDE, it worked best with Intel.
It's not that different with modern PCIe-SATA either (history repeats), Marvell PCIe/SATA adapters have lingering oddities.
AMD chipsets were not as successful in the marketplace because unsurprisingly the AMD-chipsets cost more than the Taiwanese ones, and motherboard vendors (who are almost all based in Taiwan) stuck with their existing vendors. The dual-socket AMD machines (K7-based) pretty much all had the 760MPX on it because I think only AMD had a multi-socket chipset that was reliable.
AMD also inhereted a lot of DEC engineers, so it was no surprise that K8-era their 'HyperTransport' was really 'Lighting Transport', developed at DEC.
Interestingly, Micron had also developed a chipset for AMD in this era but never released it.
nForce was also not re-licensed from ALI/ULI that I recall but I have far less insight here. nVidia at the time had a 'total system play' in mind so they were attempting to do GPU/audio/network/chipsets for AMD & Intel and got designed into original Xbox (x86-based). Jensen I think used NRE money from MSFT to fund a lot of the nVidia chipset work.
My confusion comes from wiki entry for AMD-640 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets#AMD-xxx I assumed 741 was further development based on 640.
> AMD was well aware of the "sketchy" nature of ALI/VLI/ULI/SiS
From my limited experience in practice AMD-751 was more problematic than KT133/133A. Those were still the times when hardware reviews had sections dedicated to "Stability". For example https://www.anandtech.com/show/718/5
"Even when running the DDR SDRAM at CAS 2 settings, the system did not crash once within 24 hours of our stress tests. We continued to run the stability tests and finally the first crash occurred after 34 hours of operation. Considering that this is FIC's first try at a DDR board we were very impressed with the stability of the AD11."
Personally I dont remember many vendors sticking with AMD chipsets after switch to Socket A, at least in Europe it was all VIA with some ALI/SIS. As for price its all on AMD, nobody forced them to manufacture at Dresden. If chipset was so strategic AMD should have sold it with minimal/no margin. The way I see it AMD was just seeding the market making sure to avoid chicken and egg problem.
It would have been extremely tempting for Intel to pressure motherboard manufacturers with some subtle messages like "Nice AMD750 board, too bad we don't have any more 440BX chips for you."
The Athlon debuted with only like three compatible mainboards, and two of them were minimally rebadged versions of the AMD reference design. Of course, it was still too compelling of a platform to ignore, and everyone got on board soon enough. But if R&D had stayed away from the Athlon market for an extra 6 months or a year, that could manifest in worse board design and optimization for quite a while.
They made a chipset which offered a fairly compatible AGP-like slot alongside PCI-e, and one with two full x16 slots when this otherwise required a very expensive nForce board. So of course, nVidia immediately blocked SLI support on it.